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Sales Prospecting Techniques - Inside Sales & B2B Leads
The Sales Blog
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The fact that the contact took action and reached out to your company is an indication they are searching for something--or someone--to help them improve a result they need. By prioritizing warm leads, you give yourself a chance to create an opportunity that might take you longer to acquire through cold outreach. Even though we are big on smart, cold outreach, it’s always best to handle the warm prospects first. We would argue that it’s rude to reject a lead because you suspect they aren’t quite warm enough. Do this often enough and the Gods of Sales will punish you by taking all your leads away. RELATED READING:How to Sell When You Don’t Have Leads 2. Offer a Value Proposition The discovery that I made that immediately made prospecting much easier and faster for me was something I call “The Trading Value Rule.” The rule is as follows: Whenever you ask a client for a meeting, you have to trade something valuable enough to agree to a meeting. There is only one reason your client rejects your request for a meeting, and once you know the reason behind every objection, following the rule makes it much easier to book meetings. One new salesperson who adopted this approach and the script that comes later in this list books four meetings out of ten conversations. Once you trade value for a conversation, your calendar will start to become a lot more crowded. I offer clients an executive briefing about the trends and forces that are affecting their business--or soon will be. RELATED READING:7 Tests for Your Value Proposition 3. Follow a Sales Prospecting Sequence In Eat Their Lunch, a book about stealing clients from your competitors, I included my own personal sequence. A prospecting sequence is the best and fastest way to acquire a prospect’s attention and a meeting. A prospecting sequence is a series of communications designed to result in a meeting. “Nor should you open a call with “Do you have twenty-seven seconds, another terrible opening used mostly to provide the salesperson the courage to make a call.” Leverage Prospecting Automation There are too many people who believe they should automate all of their prospecting. These approaches are beginning to cause people to stop opening or replying to emails or connections on LinkedIn. There is smart prospecting automation and not-so-smart automation. The distinction is the difference in the outcome you are pursuing. If you want to rid yourself of having to prospect at all, then automation is not-so-smart. However, you can automate all types of what we might call “transactional” communications, like confirming appointments, sending a standard agenda, providing documents and insights that will help prepare your client for a meeting. Of all the ways to leverage automation, my favorite tend to be things like Google Alerts and tracking news stories and trigger events that suggest there is a compelling reason to call your dream client. You can’t track everything going on in all your clients and prospective client companies, but automation can do it for you, including software like LinkedIn Navigator. In professional, B2B sales, success comes from both creating and winning new deals. Effective sales prospecting techniques will help you book the meetings that speed you on the path to a full calendar and an equally packed pipeline.